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oil giant Chevron accountable for its human rights
and environmental abuses in Ecuador

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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The
appetite for hypocrisy among Chevron’s “rescue team” at the law firm Gibson
Dunn & Crutcher (GDC) knows few bounds. Our latest example, courtesy
of GDC appellate partner and former Solicitor General Ted Olson, is truly
astounding.

After the
GDC trial team led by Randy Mastro bribed a key witness to win its farcical RICO case in New York, and after
Chevron scientists orchestrated a massive scientific hoax on the courts of
Ecuador, we now have Chevron’s most prominent outside lawyer and a leading
beacon of the Republican establishment working with two directors to make a
documentary film about his own case.

Sound
familiar? Olson and his minions at GDC have directed furious criticism at
New York Attorney Steven Donziger for doing the same thing with the Ecuador
litigation. In reference to Ecuador, they even have argued that making such a film results in the wholesale
waiver of attorney-client privilege and is part of an “extortion” campaign
against Chevron.

Olson’s
new film, The Case Against 8, aired earlier this
week on HBO. The film documents the travails of Olson and his team as they
fight to the Supreme Court to overturn a California law (called
Proposition 8) barring gay marriage.

In the
film, Olson and his allies openly use the media and tools of political
organizing – including raucousprotests
in front of courthouses – to advance their legal case and pressure courts via
the mobilization of public opinion. These are the same time-worn tactics used
by civil rights litigators the world over, including Donziger and the
indigenous leaders in Ecuador. Yet the GDC team claimed the use of
the exact same tactics in Ecuador was improper.

That’s the
gist of the Chevron hypocrisy. It’s the same double standard that
says Ecuadorians should put up with massive levels of toxic soil contamination
because they live in Ecuador rather than in America.Chevron proposed a clean-up standard for toxic oil waste to the Ecuador court that literally was 100 times more lax than the average
American standard. When the court rejected the preposterous proposal, Chevron hilariously claimed the judges were biased against the company.

More
interesting for our purposes is that in the Prop 8 case Olson gave the HBO filmmakers an
all-access pass to confidential meetings where lawyers were discussing internal
strategy and highly sensitive issues with witnesses and clients.

In the
Chevron case, GDC pilloried Donziger and Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo for
offering similar access to director Joe Berlinger, who produced the award-winning
filmCrude on the Ecuador case. (Crude, based on
our completely unbiased perspective, makes for a far more interesting film than the
HBO flick.It is available from Netflix.)

Chevron’s
criticism led to a vast “waiver” of attorney-client privilege that allowed GDC
access to all 600 hours of Berlinger’s outtakes. The GDC team
then sliced and diced the outtakes into fodder for its trumped-up RICO case, eliminating
key phrases to falsely portray Donziger as a thug when he was really battling heroically to neutralize Chevron’s attempted corruption of the Ecuadorian court system, as
documented in part in this stunning affidavit and related legal briefs.

Olsen authorized
the HBO film team to “embed” itself for over four years with his legal
team. Going along with the decision was none other than David Boies,
one of the top litigators in the country who also worked on the Prop 8 case and who is featured prominently in the HBO film.

In an interview posted on the HBO website, the
filmmakers brag about the “incredible access” they had to the internal deliberations
of the GDC-led team. Director Ben Cotner described how Olson allowed him
to effectively “blend into the background”: “We'd slip in
and out of rooms, sometimes in the middle of meetings. People got so used to us
being there that eventually we were just allowed to be part of that
process.”

His
co-director Ryan White added that it was his policy to “keep the cameras on” at
all times: “We shot 600 hours of footage, and many of those hours are probably
really boring stretches when we're just rolling a camera in a conference room,
since we didn't know when an important phone call was going to come in or when
a ruling might come down.”

The
filmmakers assert that this opportunity to “embed” was specifically with the
legal team, not with the plaintiffs in the case. As it turns out,
the plaintiffs were far more circumspect and only gradually allowed the
filmmakers to follow them for a limited set of activities.

Chevron’s
hypocrisy is legendary: The company spent a decade in the 1990s telling a New
York court it wanted the environmental case heard in Ecuador. When the evidence against it mounted, Chevron came running back
to New York saying Ecuador’s courts were incapable of providing a fair
trial. The company’s desperate
campaign of forum shopping has now taken the matter to more than 30 courts around
the world.In the meantime, villagers
wait for Chevron to comply with a court-mandated clean up of the billions of
gallons of toxic waste it has admitted to dumping.

We
certainly look forward to seeing HBO's video outtakes from Olson and the other
GDC lawyers. They might be of interest to foreign courts that are being asked by the rainforest
villagers to seize Chevron’s assets to force the company to comply with the
rule of law and pay the Ecuador judgment.